My hair is healthy enough, but it doesn’t shine. My skin doesn’t glow; in fact, it’s craterous in places, like my mother’s. I lack energy, and my relatively small frame always feels heavy, weighed down by something intangible. I fall asleep at inappropriate times, and yet I don’t sleep at all. I feel ill more days than I feel OK, and I cannot count my doctors on two hands. I don’t absorb nutrients.

So, like bad lovers from my younger years, plants have given me nothing, but I’m still attracted to them. Vegetables—when thoughtfully prepared—are my favorite food group. Did you just unsubscribe?

I spend a lot of time thinking about what Americans eat—how our incomes force us to eat, where our food comes from and who gets it from field to plate, how folks shame fat but not sugar, how society demonizes and diminishes intolerances, how food can heal. I choose not to tackle those questions here, because my central agenda is to have no agenda. But these are the issues that sometimes cross my mind when my fork hits the plate. (Sometimes I’m too busy stuffing my big, hungry face.) And I’m certainly opinionated about them. Lucky for me, vegetable-forward cuisine is hot right now, and restaurant chefs are using vegetables in bold new ways and putting them in the center of the plate.

My relationship with religion is complicated because it’s so simple. I have none. My mother is “Catholic”; my father is “Muslim.” Both believe in god. They both prey to him nightly for my health and well being, though they likely do it in two different languages. They don’t do anything else for him/her/it, so I’m not sure he/she/it will answer. I don’t think I believe in god, but I keep myself in the agnostic category, because I can’t know everything. I can know, however, that I believe in science and that people are picking up guns to maim on the regular. My mother doesn’t seem bothered by my disbelief; my father does, but it’s fine.

My parents come from a generation when it was common to self-identify as the faith you were born into, so just as my mother is French-Canadian, she is Catholic; just as my father is Iranian, he is Muslim. My maternal grandparents are staunch Catholics; they haven’t been to church in 30 years. Still, they probably resent that I wasn’t stripped and dunked in water by an old dude in front of an audience, though I suppose I could do that any night of the week if I choose to. I respect the practice, but it certainly doesn’t feel right to do it for the sake of doing it.